


What We Can Never Understand

by Face_of_Poe



Series: The Conway Cabal [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alexander Hamilton/OMC - Freeform, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Anxiety, Foster Care, M/M, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Underage Sex, Sex as Coping Mechanism, Therapy, Unreliable Narrator, discussions of past suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-22 03:27:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13158291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Face_of_Poe/pseuds/Face_of_Poe
Summary: "I know that it was...not good, what happened. But I don't feel tricked, I wasn't forced, I...""Was it the thought," Washington probes, curious, "that there had been others, upon overhearing Mister Conway's conversation with Mister Arnold in the library, or the thought that someone would stand silently by and let it happen, that truly bothered you?"Alexander goes very still for a moment and then snaps his gaze up to Washington's. There's something haunted in it, something there and then gone again just as fast, before it too is hidden away beneath the careful detachment that the boy seems to have perfected in the fallout of events.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Tags, people, for the love of all things sacred, heed the tags.
> 
> Sequel to _See You on the Other Side of the [Senate] Floor_ , this picks up a few months later and covers most of Alexander's last year of high school back on Saint Croix. The vast majority of the scenes from _Shouting in the Square_ take place after this, but I recommend reading that one first. 
> 
> That said, if the tags here are too daunting, don't push it. This is very psychologically-driven and dark, and while it aims to provide context for the prior two fics, isn't essential in order to enjoy them as is.
> 
> Re: the underage warning - obviously this largely deals with the dub-con of the Conway situation but there's also a consensual sexual relationship between a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old. If my understanding of consent laws in the US Virgin Islands is correct, this is legally fine, despite the age of consent being 18, since their age difference is <5 years.

Mister Pendleton keeps him after class one day at the end of their first week back in the fall. Scrutinizes him while Alexander fidgets, and the pensive frown on his face descends into something a bit more troubled the longer they stand there until at last he remarks, “You’re unusually quiet, Alexander.” And then follows it up with: “Is everything okay at home?”

What a strange thing to ask. He nods cautiously, which does little to dissipate the frown on the man’s face, so he adds, “It’s weird being back.” And, “Weird not having Neddy around.” 

“He settling in at school?”

He shrugs. “I guess.” They haven’t communicated much in the two weeks he’s been gone. When they’d left him in his shiny new dorm with his shiny new roommate, every step to re-board the ferry back to Saint Croix had been like dragging his feet through molasses.

Mister Stevens had tried his best to not look like he was watching him the whole way home in his quiet surliness, and then the whole drive back to Christiansted had been tense. A sense of inevitability, a coming explosion, each of them waiting to see what would be the thing to set it off; to set _him_ off.

Nothing, in the end; not with a bang but a whimper, and he just quietly retreated to his room upon their return and pretended to sleep through dinner.

Hasn’t done much real sleeping since.

“Okay,” Mister Pendleton doesn’t sound too convinced, but students are starting to trickle in for the next block. “Maybe one day next week you can stay after and tell me about D.C., yeah?”

“Yeah,” he replies on automatic. “Yeah, sure.”

Like the good old days. Applications in the library.

 

x---x

 

He makes a list. A literal list. A list to help keep his head on straight, to remind himself that there’s more to talk about than getting expelled or sleeping with a senator or his steady pining crush on John Laurens.

His list includes:

_Philadelphia_

_Yorktown_

And then he realizes that talking about his term in D.C. by talking about the times they _left_ the city isn’t really going to cut it either.

_Meeting Chancellor von Steuben_ just makes him think of what happened _next_. Ditto _Worked through all-night budget debate_. Ditto _The National Archives_.

So he puts it off, finds excuses not to be alone with Mister Pendleton, because he’s the sort who would actually _mean_ it when he says _tell me about D.C._

Eventually, he confides his dilemma to Mister Stevens, because that worried crease isn’t leaving Mister Pendleton’s forehead; in fact, it deepens with every class where Alexander doesn’t have an opinion to offer on every subject they’re covering and a few they’re _not._

“Do you want me to talk to him?” Alexander blinks up at him stupidly. “He’s not trying to be cruel, Alexander.”

“I know.”

“He was invested in helping you get there, he asked about you every time I saw him while you were gone.”

He declines; doesn’t want to imagine where the conversation would inevitably skew. But one day, after a few weeks have passed from the initial effort, he dallies after class and stands quietly behind Mister Pendleton as the man wipes off the dry-erase board and says, “Did Neddy not tell you that I came home early?”

His teacher turns in surprise, and then cocks his head, confused. “I know they shut it down before June, but -”

“No,” he interrupts. “I came home before that. Before… everyone else. I got expelled.”

“What? Why?”

“Punched an intern. Gave him a bloody nose.”

He doesn’t know what he expects from the blunt explanation. Disenchantment, at the very least, disappointment. Instead, the concerned lines of his brow only crease further, and he reaches out a hand to put to Alexander’s elbow. To comfort him, to draw him in closer so he can quietly ask more questions, he supposes, but Alexander is cognizant of these lines now in a way he’d never considered before, and he shies away from the touch.

Too late, he realizes what he risks giving away in his caution. Feels his cheeks heat up as he recalls being in Mister Pendleton’s class two years earlier, the dawning realization that this was a teacher who would nurture his restless mind; his _infatuation_ , as Edward later called it, gently teasing. An innocent enough thing then; not so much now, now that he’s demonstrated his own remarkably poor judgment. 

He’d compared the two men, once, in his mind. Felt the familiar stirrings of that _infatuation_ with Conway before the man had done anything more untoward than put his hands on his shoulders. Realized quickly that it was a different sort of ground he treaded with the senator, because Mister Pendleton kept their interactions confined within the school and its bounds, they didn’t trade in the secretive emails that were his undoing with Conway.

And Mister Pendleton is genuinely, he thinks, a good person whose worst sin in his relationships with his pupils is allowing himself to harbor favorites amongst them. And he flatters himself to think he was one of those favorites.

Would his opinion of Alexander plummet if he knew? If he knew that the unnamed _Student A_ in the papers covering the Senate testimony – not to be confused with the lesser infractions against former _Students B_ and _C_ , so far – was the star pupil he’d worked so hard to get to D.C. in the first place. If he knew that the lurid details of the things they’d done – admitted by his own words, passed off to James Madison, repeated in open testimony and what was he _thinking_? – had been committed by and against the student standing in front of him.

Does he already suspect?

Would he care at all? What if he didn’t despise him for it?

What if the infatuation goes both ways, and all the man needs is this opening, this realization that he’ll go easy, surely he will, he’s done it before and then learned his lesson, learned the value of silence, of compliance.

Looking back later, he’ll recognize this moment of frozen terror, terror he’s totally talked himself into over any semblance of rationality, as his first panic attack. It’s short-lived, he thinks, and he jolts out of it enough when the first student of the next class wanders in with a chipper greeting at the teacher who is staring at Alexander with that concern molting into alarm and a little bit of _fear_. Jolts out of it enough to offer a strained smile and mumble something about getting to his English class, and then dart the opposite way down the hall instead towards the bathrooms.

_What the ever-loving hell is the matter with him?_

The walls he’s spent nearly five years cultivating are crumbling, is what’s happening. 

He’ll realize that later, too. When he’s ready.

 

x---x

 

_I’d bet all the money in the world that this was never once about sex for you – so what was it about?_

He relays that line early to Doctor Kortright, three months later, three months in which he’s recovered a bit of his camaraderie with Mister Pendleton but he can still feel the hot stare of the man’s eyes when he’s got his head bowed over his desk, writing. Writing notes, tests, random thoughts in the margins of his notebook, unrelated but which he doesn’t care to lose, writing, always writing.

_Like you’re running out of time_.

“Do you know?”

He jolts out of his memories. “Hm?”

“Do you know what it was about?” He stares and fights to swallow, mouth dry. “It’s alright if you don’t; it’s alright if you say _nothing_.”

He doesn’t like _nothing_ ; nothing implies he had no part in it; made no conscious decisions and he did, he knows he did, still feels a hot flush of shame when he thinks of all the outs Conway gave him every step of the way until they were in his bed and the whiplash minute by minute of wanting out, out of this _thing_ , wanting Conway out of his body, and never wanting to let go of the warmth of another body, of the pleasure that came before and, eventually, after the pain, of the simple comfort of curling up to sleep in another’s arms. Before he’d ever kissed him, when Alexander knew and Conway knew that he knew, and _You should go_ but what an unsatisfactory conclusion to this thing they had cultivated _that_ would be and –

And he doesn’t like _nothing_ , and he tells her so.

He tells her about Mister Pendleton, then. About Edward’s assertion that he was enamored with the man because the man represented a sort of male presence in his life that had previously been absent.

And then he panics and backtracks and hastens to explain that, when he compares Pendleton and Conway, that is _not_ to say Mister Pendleton has ever behaved in any way inappropriately towards him, far from it.

She smiles gently, understanding. “We’ve all had _those_ teachers,” she assures him. “The ones who spark something in us that changes how we see and interact with the world. I understand you.” And then she asks frankly, “ _Are_ you smitten with him?”

“ _Smitten_?” He makes a face.

“Hm.” She fights for a better word or phrase. “Do you seek his especial affection?” Another face. “Approval, then.”

“Maybe?” A look. “Okay, approval, yes.”

“You like it when he notices you, though. Singles you out for attention.”

He wishes he hadn’t brought up Mister Pendleton. And he tells her so.

“One more question?” she begs, and he relents with a stilted nod. “Who was the _last_ one?”

“The last what?”

“Engaged, interested man in your life.”

“Mister Stevens.”

Doctor Kortright gives him an exasperated look. “Besides him. Or before him, even.” 

“You said one more question,” he teases, and takes a long sip of his coffee. Evades the question with the same finesse (or lack thereof) he’d retreated from Mister Pendleton’s hand at his elbow.

 

x---x

 

She doesn’t ask the question again, but he knows she’s waiting for the answer. Waits for it as she brews his obligatory session coffee, as she settles on the floor opposite him with her feet planted on the floor and forearms resting on her knees if she’s wearing pants, or with her legs curled gracefully under her if she’s in a dress or a skirt. Waits for it as she scribbles notes and reminders for herself, waits for it as she says goodbye to him for two weeks around the holidays and passes him an extra card with their office emergency number on it, just in case.

He can barely keep his thoughts in order as is; John’s arriving in a week and there’s a delicious soup of nerves, giddiness and impatience and hesitation even, churning constantly in his stomach.

He almost answers the question to John; backs out at the last minute, unwilling to add more ammunition to the painful compassion in John’s eyes. Scared of frightening him off, even as he’s yet unsure as to the ground on which they stand.

John kisses his cheek in the airport, in front of Mister Stevens and Edward no less. Kisses him full on the mouth but quick, just a taste, before he turns in for the night, nerves frayed, exposed. Lets his tongue trace Alexander’s lips while they kiss on the beach two nights later, counting down to midnight, and giggles helplessly when Alexander tries to nip at his lips in turn.

They go no further. Not even when they wake up in a tangled, sweaty mess and Alexander grins at the hardness against his stomach. John grins back, pecks him on the nose, and holds him close until they drift back off to sleep, a lazy New Year’s morning.

He leaves; Edward goes back to school. Just him and Mister Stevens again, and this strange sort of silent truce they’ve reached in a silent battle that Alexander doesn’t understand and thinks he may be imagining altogether.

He has his yearly obligatory check-in from Family Services in January. It’s been on the calendar since the last one, and Mister Stevens reminds him about it after John leaves.

He’s doing homework on the couch when the social worker shows up. She chats for a couple minutes in the kitchen with Mister Stevens, and then they come to find him. He smiles pleasantly, waves her on when she asks if it’s alright if she takes a look at his room, and resumes his work while she takes a cursory look around the house.

They have a quick interview at the end; he puts his books down and turns to face her; answers her questions either cheerfully or with relative indifference, and he sees Mister Stevens watching from the doorway to the kitchen, a frown playing across his face as if to say _When did this become such a game to you?_

When the woman looks down to jot something on her clipboard, he just quirks a brow back as if to say _When did you think it wasn’t?_

It’s formulaic, by now – there’s always an excuse to empty the room, the request for a glass of water in this case – and then she asks what she’s really there to ask. Is he safe in the home; any incidents of violence or abuse directed at him or anyone else.

“No,” he says. “Not at all. It’s a good home.” It might be the only sincere response he’s given.

When she’s gone, he rounds on Mister Stevens before the man can even get a word in. “What did you want me to tell her? That I’m in therapy, and she can read about why in every major news publication in the United States?”

“That would have been easier to watch than _that_ display,” the man shoots right back.

What would be the point? He’s a name on a list. An _old_ name, a name in a stable home, a low-maintenance orphan and no one’s going to look for reasons to rock that boat when he’s so close to aging out.

_He loves you a lot; I can tell_ , John had remarked one night in the living room after Mister Stevens came home from work and checked in on them before starting in on dinner.

_I know_ , he’d replied. _S’what makes it so hard_.

_Makes what hard?_ John had asked. 

He just shook his head. Had never had those words to explain.

 

x---x

 

He does Mister Stevens’s books at the restaurant every few months or so. Gets paid for his time, but he’d do it for free. He likes numbers. Even likes it when the numbers don’t come out, because then it’s a _puzzle_ with numbers.

So he takes his usual bus home but hops off a stop early. Walks in the restaurant an hour before they open for dinner, and gets halted halfway back to the office next to the kitchen by a new employee, at least one he doesn’t recognize. “Can I help you?”

“Just here to see Tom,” he smiles and points.

“Oh, I can go get Mister S if you -”

One of his colleagues shouts a greeting at Alexander; he waves, throws an impulsive wink at the new guy, and ducks around him.

New guy comes and taps on the open door frame fifteen minutes later with a cup of coffee on a saucer. He fights from laughing; anyone who knew him would have brought a whole carafe.

He learns new guy is named Marc; points this out to Marc, and gets a wink in return with a, “Maybe I just wanted to have to come back,” and oh, okay, so they’re doing this.

They flirt; it’s easy. Simple. Marc probably thinks he’s older than he looks. Or maybe he doesn’t, he barely looks older than twenty himself.

He finishes his work just after the hour, the first patrons already drifting in. Marc intercepts him halfway to the door and walks him the rest of the way, and asks, “Don’t suppose I could get your number? Or am I just a pretty face to distract you from your work?”

“Aw, and I was going to ask _you_ that.”

There’s a snort of laughter from the host podium; Alexander hadn’t even seen the man standing there, head bowed over the tables and servers chart. “He’s in high school, Marc; are you ready to go home and do your _homework_ , Alexander?”

He grinds his teeth and stares at Mister Stevens. Marc beats a fairly hasty retreat, and he’s not sure if it’s the age that scares him off, or the implication that he’s his boss’s son. 

Either way. “Thanks.”

“What are you even doing?” 

Upping the ante. A stupid and even dangerous thing, considering he still doesn’t know what game they’re playing.

 

x---x

 

Marc, as it turns out, was just the warmup. He meets Oliver a few weeks later. In town, on a lazy Saturday morning, running a couple errands for Mister Stevens, and he stops at a café and gets a drink to take with on his walk back home.

After he orders, a boy standing by the counter waiting for his drink glances up from a phone and asks, “Where’re you staying?”

Alexander blinks and glances around. “Huh?”

“My parents rented a _villa_ , it’s boring and awful.” British, he decides by the voice. “Trying to figure out which is the _fun_ resort around here.”

Oh. _Oh_. “Oh, no, sorry. I live here.”

That earns the stranger’s full gaze, which he sweeps discerningly up and down Alexander. “Sorry. You sound American.”

And wryly, he points out, “I _am_ ,” and gets an eye-roll in return.

“You know what I mean.”

What he means is: he speaks with a funny accent, but not the funny one he was expecting. What he’s probably thinking: he’s too pale, even for his Puerto Rican side. A regional mutt, a misfit, a polyglot.

The tourist gets his drink and disappears; Alexander’s comes up a few minutes later, and he spots the boy at a table outside, back to the side of the building to keep the sun off the laptop he’s opening on the table.

“Giving up so soon on your misadventures?”

“They say,” he murmurs, digging out a pair of sunglasses from his bag and sliding them over his nose, “that everyone’s got a book in them.”

“And that in most cases, that’s where it should stay.”

The corner of his thin mouth turns up, and he looks at Alexander with a bit more interest. “Oliver.”

“Alex.” Takes up the other chair without invitation and leans back, takes a careful sip of his drink. “If you’re here to write a book, why do you want to find the parties?”

His arch response: “Well I need something to write about, now don’t I?”

“Write about me.” A challenge.

“Give me something to write about, then.”

Challenge met, and bar raised substantially; probably the moment he felt the pull of something more than just bored flirtation, a sharp, whirlwind desire to do wicked things, an outlet for these long months of frayed nerves at home, at school, at therapy, rinse, repeat.

Still, he hedges; pretends he misinterpreted his meaning; gives Oliver room to misinterpret _his_. “Have you been to Fort Christiansvaern?”

“I’m not interested in history. I’d rather dabble in the future.”

“Well, there’s no time like the present.”

“That was cheesy; I like it.” He pauses, considers Alexander some more, and then closes his laptop. “Want to go make out on the beach?”

He could be a tropical vacation fling, he thinks. “Yeah, okay.” It’s so matter-of-fact, the way Oliver packs up his laptop again. And because he’d rather get it out of the way now, he adds, “I’m seventeen, by the way. In case that’s… problematic.”

“Americans are such puritans still.” He must read something in Alexander’s eyes though, because he slides his glasses down his nose and peers at him intently, and grins, devilish. “Did you get someone into trouble, Alex?”

He swallows hard. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Hm; maybe you will give me something to write about after all.”

They walk and talk; he learns that Oliver (nineteen, almost twenty, not a problem) is four days into a two week vacation with his parents and some family friends. That he graduated secondary school in 2017 and then took a gap year.

“What happened?”

“My gap year took a gap year.”

They do more talking and staring out over the sea and dipping their toes in the surf than making out, but Oliver kisses him like he’s trying to memorize his touch, his taste, his smell, his every pore and every atom, and his hands never leave his face.

He’s electrified; this is something new, he _wants_ , craves his touch anywhere, _everywhere_ , this stranger, this temporary addition to his life and then bound to return home again and be eventually relegated to a fond memory in the back of his mind, that vague recollection of his impassioned fling with a passing tourist.

He wants. Wants to give into turbulent, teenage emotions and the fickle cravings of his body and have something lustful without the weight of secrecy or looming questions of a future that does not exist here. 

Wants something that’s just about sex.

 

x---x

 

If Mister Stevens lights on to anything, he doesn’t say. He goes to his weekly appointment with Doctor Kortright two days after his first meeting with Oliver and tells her about him.

He doesn’t tell her about his oddly undefined power struggle with his guardian; can tell she realizes that something’s amiss when she doesn’t much engage him on the topic of his sudden determination to have a no-strings fling except to ask him to be careful with his head, his heart, and his body.

(“And for God’s sake, Alexander, you don’t know how many islands he’s hopped, if you get my drift.”)

They meet on the beach that night after dinner, and Alexander wears a collared shirt the next day to hide the bruise sucked into his neck. On Wednesday, they stay late by the water, after dark, after everyone else is gone, and then retreat to a spot near the tree-line at the top of the beach and exchange blowjobs, and Alexander kisses him after, can taste himself in Oliver’s mouth and wonders if the other boy can do the same, and asks, “Have enough to write about yet?”

“The prologue’s good, anyway.” He slips a knee between Alexander’s and leans over so he’s half atop him, kisses him hard and slips a hand down the back of his shorts. A suggestion, a question, a promise, he’s not sure, but he wraps his free leg around the back of Oliver’s and draws him closer.

It’s not that late when he finally makes it home, but it’s a school night. Mister Stevens asks him, tone forcibly even, “Let me know when you’ll be out later than usual, hm?”

He’s never had a curfew at home; never had much need of one. He has the strangest urge to utter the most petulant of replies – _You’re not my father_. Restrains himself; isn’t sure if such a proclamation would reduce the other man to laughter or tears, and the sheer obviousness of it is banal.

The next night, he returns home exactly one minute earlier, and gets a pursed lip stare. Can tell the man is trying to decide- _teenage rebellion or something more_? Something _less_ , Alexander thinks, the shattered equilibrium of his life in this house without Edward as the intermediary, the cohesive central figure tying his relationship to Mister Stevens and keeping the peace.

It’s not a role Edward ever understood he played, because the battle, Alexander knows, is one waged largely in silence and in his own head.

He’s in his bed that night reading on his phone when he feels the weight of the man’s presence outside his door more than he actually hears the approach of footsteps. Hovering. Thinking. Fretting.

Alexander puts down his phone and closes his eyes. Wills the specter in the hall to make up its mind. Turn the knob _it’s unlocked, come in, make up your mind, show me your cards and I’ll show you mine._

It takes him hours to fall asleep after the footsteps retreat.


	2. Part II

Friday morning before school, Mister Stevens asks him, “If I let it up to you, would you stop seeing Doctor Kortright?”

A cruel, manipulative thing to ask, but he’s asking several things at once. _Do you want to go? Do you think you_ need _to go? Are you responsible enough to balance the want against the need? Can I trust you now and what about seven months from now when you might head to school or eleven months from now when it won’t matter anyway because you can do what you want after your next birthday?_

“I’d prefer not to deal in hypotheticals,” he answers.

Friday afternoon, Oliver calls his cell phone from the landline at his parents’ rental and tells him that the house will be empty tonight, everyone’s going out eating and drinking in town and he’s begged off.

“Did you tell them about me?” he asks wryly.

“I mean, I told them I made a local friend and that hanging out with the olds on a Friday night was supremely uncool.”

He snorts, asks where they’re going; to Alexander’s warped delight, they’re starting the night at the restaurant Mister Stevens runs. _Does he know it_ , yes, he’ll meet him there when they come into town, he can meet his parents, be the charming local distraction.

It’s a few minutes after six when he goes in; spots their group immediately, ducks past a questioning look from Grace at the host’s stand, and slides into the last empty chair at a table full of strangers while Oliver bites his lip behind his water glass but can’t hide the dark stare he throws Alexander’s way.

The four adults pester him with questions, like he’s an exotic commodity, a _local_ in a place where wealthy people from wealthy places generally come to stay at expensive resorts with other wealthy people from wealthy places, because they want to _vacation_ without actually _traveling_ , at least not out of their comfort zone.

Oliver’s parents have thicker accents than he does; the other couple sounds French.

He shows off. Shamelessly.

“D’où venez-vous?” he asks, and proceeds to have a brief conversation with them about their roots in Lyon and his mother’s in Lille by way of Saint Martin.

_Stay_ , they beg him and Oliver, _stay and talk, for wine and appetizers at least_.

He declines; someone passes him a small glass anyway while Oliver just looks on, resigned and amused, and before he’s had more than two sips, an arm is descending to pluck it away from him and he grins mischievously up at their server’s scowling face. “You trying to get us in trouble, Alexander?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he swears, and then explains to the semi-scandalized faces in faux-dejection, “Still seventeen; can’t drink here until eighteen.” And then answers the other question in their eyes, “My guardian runs the place, they know me.”

“Guardian?” Oliver’s professor-father asks. “Exchange student?”

“Just a boring old orphan,” he laments with a cheeky grin.

The French woman grabs his hand. “Mais ta pauvre mère?”

“Elle est morte, il y a… cinq ans ce mois.”

They let him and Oliver go without fuss after that. They duck out of the place into the damp dusk air, laughing and hanging off of one another.

“You’re a menace,” Oliver says.

“There’s a scooter rental place on the boardwalk,” Alexander says.

They get one bike and two helmets. Wind their way up into the hills south of the city, and it’s not far, would have been walkable if tiring. Park the bike in the grass next to the driveway of a house that’s more windows than walls, a balcony overlooking the sea in the distance.

He studies it for a long minute from below, assesses the view from the neighboring properties, and declares, “I want to have sex on that balcony.”

“What will the neighbors say?”

“Good riddance when you fuck off back to England, I guess.”

They don’t rush, but they don’t prevaricate about it either. From the impression he got at the restaurant, he’s not altogether sure his parents would even _care_ if they found them here, indecent, with no delusions as to what they’d been doing.

There’s a familiarity to it and yet it’s wholly different. Fun. Teasing. Sweet. Oliver still kisses him like he’s drowning, but he lets his hands wander this time; unbuttons his shirt, yanks his belt undone, and Alexander can only imagine the picture they make, sprawled and debauched, young and carefree and hedonistic to a degree that’s only made possible by the promise that Oliver will be gone forever in another week and this is just here, now, an intersecting chapter in the stories of their lives that will otherwise remain unaligned, separated by time and distance and circumstance.

He wriggles out of his pants; immediately, there’s a hand around him, relentless, pulling him closer to the edge while he clings to the older boy’s shoulders and gasps into his neck.

“I can’t – I’m gonna -”

“Yeah, come on,” he urges. “Let go, let go, let go.”

He does, comes in Oliver’s hand and across his own stomach, panting and gasping. When he reaches for Oliver’s shorts, gets his wrist pinned down by his clean hand and a smirking grin, and then he’s smearing his hand through the mess on his stomach and reaching down, is pressing a fingertip into him before Alexander even registers his intent.

He moans, unrestrained, caught off guard, hyper-sensitive on the heels of his orgasm.

“This okay?” He pushes deeper.

“This is fucking _filthy_ ,” he gasps.

“Dunno why,” Oliver counters, practically leisurely as he begins teasing a second finger against the first. “Less filthy than getting someone _else_ ’s in there.”

He likes that image though, even if he’s smart enough in his lust-addled haze not to do it. “Just tell me you have actual lube.”

Oliver snorts. “You know how goddamn hard it was to find any in this godforsaken place?” Finally works the second finger in and adds, “At the risk of sounding presumptive.” 

“Presume,” Alexander groans and shifts on the bed – not the balcony tonight, after all. “Presume your way straight through the porniest chapter of your book, just glove up first.”

 

“Am I hurting you?” Oliver asks a few minutes later, braced on his arms, a hand petting down the side of Alexander’s face as he gasps and winces in turns.

“Yes,” he replies without hesitation, with total honesty, because he feels open, on display, the realest version of himself he’s known these past twelve months, these past five _years_. “Don’t stop. Please, _please_ , don’t stop.”

 

x---x

 

He cringes at every little bump in the road on the ride back down the hill, and then laughs in Oliver’s ear. Giddy. High on this _thing_ he’ll never be able to adequately describe again in his life, this freedom. 

He directs the way to a little carry-out window where the tourists almost never go; orders them both curry rice and chicken, and grins at Oliver’s delight with the fried plantains. “Best food in Christiansted,” he opines. “Better than all those swanky resort bistros.”

They walk and eat as he and Edward had done as boys; when Edward’s dad would be at the restaurant and Alexander’s mother at her store, and they’d meet up and wander the streets and the beach, or go back to the store for ice cream. So many summer nights he’d just go home with Edward and Mister Stevens for dinner, nights that became more frequent when he was ten and Edward twelve, and their father was gone and James was home and irritable all the time. Sometimes he just wouldn’t go home at all.

Oliver offers to take him home on the rented scooter; he wavers, and then declines, wants some time alone with his thoughts. Wishes he _had_ taken him up on it when he walks in the door a bit before ten and finds Mister Stevens sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in his hand, because it would have at least given them something to talk about besides the hard look in the man’s eyes.

“Sit down.”

The door isn’t even closed. He pushes it slowly backwards with his foot until it clicks, and, just to be contrary, hops up to take a seat on the counter next to the sink instead of at the table. “Sir.”

The hard look veers from frustration to something closer to anger, but he just asks quietly, “Who were you out with tonight?”

He shrugs. Nonchalant. “Made a tourist friend. He’s around another few days.”

“So, a stranger.”

“I mean, insomuch as he’s had his tongue down my throat for the better part of the past week, yeah.”

“You say that,” Mister Stevens remarks evenly, “like you think it’s going to shock me.” Or maybe he just wants it to. Wants the reaction. “So you’re getting friendly and taking illegal drinks from strangers, basically.”

He stares. “When have you _ever_ cared if I had -?”

“At home, Alexander!” he smacks a hand down on the table. “No, I don’t care if Edward wants to pass you a beer when you’re _here_. Not out in public, not alone. Not from some man you just met -”

“He’s nineteen! His _parents_ gave me a glass of wine, _Christ_ , no one’s slipping me roofies at the club.”

His jaw works tersely. “Okay. So you’ve got things all figured out for yourself; what happens when Daniel gets accused of serving alcohol to minors and the restaurant gets its license pulled?”

_You trying to get us in trouble, Alexander?_ He swallows, and does feel an honest curl of guilt in his chest at that. “I didn’t think it -”

“Let me stop you there – you didn’t think. That’s right. Because you’re so pleased with yourself and whatever little belated rebellion thing you’ve got going on that there’s not much room for consequences, is there?”

“Fuck this.” He slides off the counter. “I’m not playing games.” _Liar_.

“You’ve been playing games since you came to live in this house, haven’t you?”

It takes him aback; Mister Stevens is rarely angry, let alone so derisively cutting. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.” He needs a shower. Needs to recalibrate his mind and his body around this new information he’s gleaned tonight, this thing that’s _just about sex_ and sex for the sake of sex, sex without worries or consequences beyond a mildly uncomfortable ride down the winding streets outside the city.

“Sit down, Alex.”

He ignores him; hears his guardian swear under his breath as he marches past, determined, down the short hall to his room, and if he needs to put off the shower until the man’s gone to bed, well, tomorrow’s Saturday, so be it.

He’s got three buttons of his shirt undone before the door flies open again behind him and he starts and whirls, wide-eyed and frozen, because this isn’t the playbook, this isn’t what they _do_ , this isn’t a house of yelling and slamming doors and flying into rages, not a house of barging in his room, uninvited and unannounced and _you had the thought_ his brain reminds him while he vaguely registers the words Mister Stevens is nearly shouting at him about _taking this seriously_ and _there’s acting stupid and then there’s doing plain dangerous things_ and _just because I’ve never had to ground you before_ and so on and so forth, _the thought of just finally laying it out, show me your cards and I’ll show you mine and -_

“Alex. _Alex_. _Stop_.”

He’s trembling, he realizes in an abstract sort of a way. Realizes it because his fingers won’t cooperate where he’s resumed unbuttoning his shirt, sitting on the edge of the bed and not sure when he moved from the center of the room but it’s a small room.

Mister Stevens is trying to take his hands in his, stop them from where they’re frantically scrabbling for the too-small buttons; gets him by the wrists and he squeezes his eyes shut and can’t stop the sob that tears through his throat.

This is the moment, he’ll later realize, when the wall he’s spent the past five years cultivating crumbled completely.

It’s a weird facsimile of the scene in the airport, when his mind was just grasping at the realization that his role in the Conway story was not going to remain a secret, when Mister Stevens had held him until he _let_ himself be held, resigned himself to his new reality.

He’s not resigned today, and he struggles in the man’s hold, he’s not doing this again, but Mister Stevens won’t get out of his space, won’t stop touching him and he’s upset too, confused, floundering for all that he does not understand. “Alex, _please_.”

“No.” He wants up, wants away. “Stop.”

He doesn’t, just crouches down to try to look him in the face, hands still gripping his arms and his hold isn’t tight but suffocating nonetheless. “Please, Alexander. I don’t understand. _Help me_ understand, please.”

“I don’t want it!”

“What?”

He presses his eyes closed and forces a cease to his struggles. Finds the courage to whisper, “You’re in my room and in my space and touching me and _I don’t want it_.”

The hands abruptly withdraw but it’s a pyrrhic victory, the look of despair and self-recrimination on the man’s face is almost _worse_ , and the hand he claps to his mouth and the tears that well in his eyes _are_ , and Alexander is just left sitting there, shaking on the edge of the bed.

When Mister Stevens recovers enough, he manages to croak out, somewhere between an accusation and a plea, “What happened tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“Alexan-”

“Let me have this,” he pleads. “Just – let me have this thing that is good and simple and honest and private.” _This thing that is just about sex, sex and young, impulsive passion._

He must say it with adequate sincerity and conviction, because Mister Stevens deflates, gives up. Retreats to regroup now that Alexander has unveiled part of his hand.

 

x---x

 

When he stumbles into the kitchen for coffee late the next morning, Mister Stevens is sitting quietly in the living room with the TV on. Lets him pass in silence the first time, and then says his name evenly on the way back through to halt him. Doesn’t move though; makes no move to stand and follow, just sits and quietly asks him to stop.

He holds the coffee in both hands and hovers in the doorway.

“Edward’s spring break is in a couple weeks,” he reminds him.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to go stay with Ann until then?”

The absurdity of the proposition takes a few seconds to fully register, and he recoils. “What?”

“I don’t know what we’re doing, you and I. You’re unhappy. And worse, even if you’d never admit it, I think you’re scared of me and I don’t know why. Don’t know what I did, or didn’t do. I’m sorry for storming in on you in anger last night; I’ve always wanted you to be able to feel like that space was yours and I broke my own rule about that last night. But I don’t think that’s what that was about.”

“So you’re sending me away.”

Frustration flits through his eyes and is visibly tampered down, with effort. “I don’t want you to go; I’m asking if _you_ want to go.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay.” He turns to head slowly back to his room. “Are you going out again tonight?”

Pause. “Probably.”

“Can I meet your friend?”

Jesus. “Sure.”

“Thank you.”

 

x---x

 

He’s at work that afternoon when he makes his plans with Oliver, so they stop in, get an irritated glance from Daniel, and wait in the office near the kitchens while Mister Stevens finishes up with a problem on the floor. It feels a little like having a date show up to take him to prom, awkwardly meeting the parents, but better here than at the house.

Oliver plays the charmer as well as Alexander had the night prior. “Mister Stevens,” he shakes the man’s hand.

“Tom, please.”

“Tom, then. Lovely to meet you. Alex has been an invaluable tour guide and travel companion this past week, I’m sorry if I’ve stolen him away too much from home.”

“No, no,” he says wryly. “Though from what I hear, you’ve done a bit more than touring and traveling.”

Alexander face-palms, but Oliver just laughs, or laughs it off, it’s hard to say. “Oh dear. Everyone must experience a whirlwind vacation romance before they die, you must forgive me.”

“Mmhm.”

“My parents are quite taken with Alex, I’ll have you know,” and then he turns to Alexander and adds, “I think Luc and Marguerite are prepared to kidnap you and whisk you back to Lyon so, perhaps lie low when we leave on Tuesday.”

“Duly noted.”

 

Oliver also laughs off his attempts to apologize. “That was sweet. Did he spot a love-bite or something?”

“Or something.”

The older boy grabs his hand and stops him in the middle of the boardwalk; dodges a few passing tourists around them and presses Alexander backwards against the wooden railing and kisses him slow and deep. “If the cat’s out of the bag,” he murmurs, nuzzling his way down Alexander’s neck, “no harm in giving you more, I suppose.”

 

He does.

There’s a giant circular… sofa? bed?... on the balcony at their fancy rental villa, with a canopy that largely blocks out the sun and, in turn, the views from any of the other nearby properties with their own ostentatious overlooks and rich people furniture. They curl up on it together and fall asleep, and wake up when the four adults return from a day trip hiking on Saint John. 

“Alors, c’est comme ça,” Marguerite observes as she steps out onto the balcony with a martini glass. Oliver grins at the blush on Alexander’s face.

 

x---x

 

When they’re alone again, Oliver retreats to his room and comes back with a sleeve of condoms and the lube bottle. Alexander eyes the former and quirks a brow. “Ambitious.”

“Impatient.” Crawls back up on the bed and slides his hands under his shirt, warm and sticky after whiling away the late afternoon and evening out in the humidity. Unfastens the button on his pants but makes no move to slide them off, just kisses his stomach and grins up at him and asks, “Do you want to do it the other way?”

For some reason, the question catches him off guard. Things had just sort of… fallen into place, unspoken, the night before. “I never have,” he confesses.

“We can. Are you sore?”

A little. “I’m okay.”

He doesn’t really want to, he realizes. Isn’t quite sure why. Is glad he declined when half an hour later he’s on his hands and knees, with Oliver draped over his back and panting in his ear, a hand tight on his hip and the other pulling him off slowly, too slow and it’s so much, too much, and not enough, even when he shudders and comes and belatedly worries that they didn’t put down a blanket or a towel or anything to catch the mess.

“It’s a good thing you’re leaving soon,” Alexander groans once they’ve both flopped on their backs side-by-side, “or I might be tempted to keep you.”

“It’s a good thing I’m leaving, or I’ll never get my book written.”

“Stay another week and it’ll be a trilogy.” 

He grins and bites his shoulder.

 

x---x

 

Doctor Kortright smiles vaguely when he provides the obligatory update about Oliver; he doesn’t know how to read her expression. It’s not disapproval or disappointment, it’s almost… expectant. Like she’s waiting for a detail he’s determined to hold back, or waiting for a realization to strike him in the course of his recounting of the past week.

“Will you miss him when he leaves tomorrow?”

He shrugs. “I mean, sure. But if he lived here, we never could have had this.”

It sounds more fucked up when he says it aloud than when he thinks it in his head. She might agree. “You think you can only have happy, healthy intimacy when it comes with a defined end-date?”

“I… no?” he hedges. “But it’s…it’s about more than that. Or less than that maybe, I don’t know. For me. Right now.”

“How so?”

He fidgets, shifts his weight where he’s sitting on the floor and stalls so he can drink half his coffee. “Even if there were someone here – someone at school, whatever – who I _wanted_ to be with… I don’t think I could handle it. Not with the constant hovering question of _what happens tomorrow_? And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Oliver and I only had so many tomorrows.”

“You’re an adolescent who’s barely dipped his toe into the realm of romance and sexuality, it’s _supposed_ to be messy.”

“I did messy,” he counters flatly. “It was horrid. Now I got something easy. And fun. And stress-free and mutual and -” And, oh, that’s what she was waiting for. Him to talk himself into a corner by way of comparison. “Yes,” he preempts her next question, can see it taking shape behind her dark eyes. “I can tell the difference now. Even though I said yes every time he hesitated. Even though I still have no doubt I could have walked away at any point.”

“So then what’s the difference?”

“Oliver never hesitated,” he murmurs down at the floor. “Because he didn’t _have_ to. Because we didn’t start out in a very different sort of relationship built on uneven ground, we just… _wanted_. And did. And enjoyed ourselves and didn’t worry about it afterwards.”

She takes a minute to collect her thoughts on that, and speaks slowly. “I know consent sounds like it should be a straightforward question. Yes or no. You said yes, and you said it several times. But there are many shades of gray and that’s not even a remotely ambiguous one. In a relationship where being discovered comes with _consequences_ , where the entire affair is built on secrecy and the fear of that secret being known… there’s an inherent feel of coercion. Even absent threats of force or violence. Even if Mister Conway did not consciously propagate the notion that _you_ would suffer consequences if you revealed the secret.”

He remembers Washington, then, the incongruous picture of the senator sitting on the stoop of the back porch. _It doesn’t matter what preceded the moment when the line was finally crossed - the onus was always on_ him _, ethically and legally, not to cross it_.

But he can’t be satisfied. “And yet, I still walked into it with my eyes wide open. I knew what I was getting into.”

“Do you remember what we talked about in December? What Mister Stevens asked you back in May?” He presses his lips together and looks down. “Your relationship with Oliver was built on the physical. What about your relationship with Mister Conway?”

_This was never once about sex for you – so what was it about?_

She’s still waiting on an answer to _her_ question back in December.

He doesn’t give one. 

And it’s not until he sees Mister Stevens sitting in the waiting room, at the end of his hour, that he realizes he avoided entirely the tale of their altercation.

 

x---x

 

In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, they end up having dinner back at the restaurant with Oliver’s whole party. Or, rather, _he_ does, and Mister Stevens is working, but Oliver’s parents and their French friends are intelligent and witty and charming enough in their own right, and so they eventually coax the man to sit and chat with them, and he seems to look a bit more favorably on Oliver after that.

They go back to the café where they met on a Saturday morning ten days ago to say goodbye, because he’ll be in school tomorrow when they leave anyway. Take their drinks back outside, tables brightly lit by lamplight, and they sit and look at each other. “I hope I haven’t gotten you into any trouble,” Oliver says teasingly. “Or if I have, that it was worth it.”

“I don’t think so, but it was in any case.”

He’s got his laptop bag and he reaches down; Alexander thinks they’re going to come full circle with his computer, but he produces instead a manila envelope and slides it across the table. “For you. For later.”

“What is it?”

“What I was _actually_ working on when you so rudely interrupted last weekend.”

He feigns disappointment. “ _Not_ the next great piece of imperialist Caribbean literature?”

“It might be my vacation,” Oliver considers him over a slow sip of his tea. “But I look at you and think that perhaps I’m just a character in _your_ story, Alexander Hamilton.”

Which seems very deep and profound, if more unsettling than flattering.

They don’t draw it out; finish their drinks, kiss sweetly from across the table, and go their separate ways.

In the envelope, which he refrains from opening until he’s finished his schoolwork and gotten ready for bed, is a short story about a woman who lives a short and tragic life in old colonial Saint Croix, undone by lust, love, and fate by turns. It’s very sad, and something about it reminds him of his mother, but he laughs when she’s imprisoned in Fort Christiansvaern, because it’s described in such keen detail that Oliver must have been before their paths had crossed.

It’s very good though, and he wonders if Oliver just dabbles or plans to write at university. Wonders if, despite his protestations of a boring stay with his boring parents and their boring friends, he didn’t come on the vacation because he wanted to flex his muse.

Wonders that he knew so little about him, in the end. Wonders that he doesn’t mind not knowing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 3 shall be up tomorrow at some point, and the final installment hopefully on Friday morning before I go get a wisdom tooth yanked out. Weee...  
> Hope everyone is enjoying the angst-fest!


	3. Part III

Two days later, he comes home from school and finds a packet from Columbia on the kitchen table. He knows he got in before he opens it, the ever-present tell of the sheer quantity of materials in the envelope. So he opens it and reads the form letter, and can’t figure out how to feel.

“It’s probably not going to matter,” he finds himself prevaricating over dinner that night as Mister Stevens flips through the enrollment book. “Even – _even_ if they’ll cover tuition, and that’s a big _if_ – the room and board and fees and books…”

He could go to UVI for practically free. It would be the smart thing to do. Take the scholarship they’ve offered, come back in summers. _Yes_ , Mister Stevens had assured him with a strained smile _, even after you’re eighteen_. He’d help him with books too, at least initially, let him keep his savings intact.

It’s not that he _wouldn’t_ help him with those incidentals for Columbia, it’s just that it’d be such a drop in the bucket.

So he sits on it and waits for the financial aid letter. Sits and waits for Edward to come home for spring break. Sits and stays in, goes back to being the _good_ , responsible kid and puts his all into being perfectly and uninterestingly amiable, lest his guardian feel the need to revisit his total emotional meltdown barely a week prior.

Doctor Kortright manages to weasel some of it out of him, anyway. Once he’s hashed out his mixed feelings on the Columbia acceptance and his excitement to have Edward home for ten days at the end of the week, she remarks in that sort of _I can tell you’re stonewalling me so I’m fishing_ voice, “We haven’t talked much about Edward.” His last visit, to be fair, had been largely overshadowed by John’s. “How long have you two known one another?”

He thinks back. “Ten years this summer, I guess.”

“How’d you meet?”

“My mom ran a store a few blocks from his dad’s restaurant. He sent Neddy down to pick something up one day while I was in there.” He smiles vaguely down at his shoes. “To hear my mother tell it for years afterwards, I decided he was my friend and that was that.”

She laughs. “Somehow, I can picture it.”

“We spent… a _lot_ of time together. Especially as we got a little older, old enough to roam the boardwalk on our own, weekends and summers, we’d just…”

He trails off with a sigh, and figures he may as well give her something here, something to… draw it together. “It was one of _those_ kinds of friendships. One where we’d just… walk into one another’s house without a thought, where my mom would just shoot Mister Stevens a text that Neddy was staying for dinner, or he’d let her know I was staying the night, until eventually I had pajamas and a toothbrush over there and vice versa.

“So then fast forward through the years and the bullshit. Mister Stevens told me last May, after I got back from D.C. that it felt like I still… that I behaved like I was visiting my friend. That three years on, I wouldn’t let myself be more than a guest in his house. And Edward left a couple months later for school and it just – that illusion doesn’t hold up, anymore.”

It’s more information that he’s wont to give in a single sitting, a single spiel, and she looks at him with a curious frown playing across her lips. She sips her water and watches him and considers, and then hones in on: “Would you say you consider Edward a brother?”

He answers her warily; like he senses a trap. “For simplicity’s sake, I refer to him that way sometimes.”

“Do you ever do the same for Mister Stevens?” He blinks. “I’m assuming not, since you still refer to him here quite formally.”

Uncomfortable, he shrugs. “Mom called him _Tom_. That felt weird. Certainly wasn’t going to call him _dad_ , so.”

“Do you _like_ Mister Stevens?”

Alexander chews on the inside of his cheek, mulling not so much the question as the intent behind it. “He’s very nice. And… supportive, and everything else he’s supposed to be.” And after a momentary pause, he adds, “He loves me. I know that. He doesn’t say it, because he knows I wouldn’t be comfortable hearing it. I think he probably did before, too, even if ten-year-old me never gave it a thought.”

“It’s a big thing, an extraordinary commitment, what he did.”

“He’s a good person.”

Her mouth quirks wryly. “But you don’t like him.”

“I don’t dislike him.”

“You’re very defensive.”

“I can’t figure out what you’re asking me,” he snaps, and pretty well proves her point.

“I’m just trying to better understand your relationships at home, Alexander.”

He huffs under his breath. “I’m a foster kid, isn’t there a built-in degree of dysfunctionality included in that deal?”

It takes her aback, and the beginnings of concern creep into her eyes. “Not necessarily, Alexander. And it surprises me to hear it, to be honest, given your close prior relationship. Did you feel that way _before_ you came home from D.C.? Before Edward left last fall?”

“What way?”

“Dysfunctional.”

“I don’t…” He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and fights to follow the train of logic. “Dysfunctional wasn’t a good word. I’d like to retract it.”

“There’s no court record, you realize.”

“He sees me like a son and I don’t want another father. There’s no great story here. No big mystery. We have a fundamental incompatibility of familial intimacy, which we both acknowledge and do our best to work around. My workaround was Edward, until Edward left, so things changed again. We deal.”

But the frown doesn’t leave Doctor Kortright’s face, and he can’t help but feel like he’s digging a deeper hole. “You grew up treating his house like an extension of your own. He was caring for you when your mother died, and then began the process to seek long-term custody of you rather than see you spend six years moving between group homes and temporary -”

“No,” he cuts her off. “That’s not – no.” Her frown deepens; he frowns back. “There was a custody arrangement in her will. When dad left, she wanted things in writing, which was… prescient.”

“An arrangement with whom?”

He bites his lip and sighs, and glances up and out of the window behind her desk. “My cousin. Peter.”

“And it fell through?”

“You could say that.”

“Did he refuse? Or was he deemed unfit?”

A mirthless chuckle escapes him as he runs a hand through his hair, lost as to how this hasn’t come up; how this wasn’t part of Mister Stevens’s initial explanation, when he made the appointment, of their relationship and Alexander’s family history. “He put a nine millimeter round in his brain, he was pretty unfit.”

He’s shocked her, he can tell; possibly the only time he’s done so with the glaring exception of when he’d finally worked up the nerve at their second appointment to stop talking in circles and admit that his _dubious life choices_ were, in fact, the very ones she could read about online or in the paper, that her cagey new patient was at the center of the scandal that had rocked the D.C. political establishment. “And when did that happen?”

“Six months later.”

She wipes at her mouth, trying to collect herself. She runs through the timeline. “Your mother died. You were in the care of Mister Stevens, and then were placed in your cousin’s custody, where you spent six months. He took his life, at which time you were transferred to Family Services, at which time Mister Stevens began the process of qualifying as a foster guardian.”

“I don’t know if he began it straightaway but, yeah.”

There’s a long silence. He fidgets and looks away again, feeling awkward and exposed. Doctor Kortright picks up her glass and takes his empty mug to place on the counter, and then comes and settles herself back down. “I’m really sorry, Alexander, I – I didn’t mean to spring this conversation on you. I made assumptions early on that I should have clarified.”

But even as she says it, he can see the doubt creep into her eyes. They’ve _talked_ about his mother’s death; they’ve _talked_ about his year with Family Services, the group home, his move into the Stevens house.

_Her oversight or his omission?_

The question’s there. It’s there, and their time’s almost up. 

Regardless, as she walks him out, he knows she suspects that she’s gotten her answer at last.

 

x---x

 

Edward comes home on a Friday afternoon in early March. He’s there in the kitchen with his dad when Alexander comes home from school, and he drags Alexander into a bear hug before he’s even got the door closed.

“Mmph.”

“Hey, short-stuff. Missed you.”

“Yeah?”

He pulls back and grins. “Sometimes. You know, when everyone on campus was busy with their chess club and Hillel and… I don’t know, College Pagan Collective meetings.”

“You’re a dick,” he remarks fondly. “UVI sounds _great_.”

“Yeah yeah, Mister Ivy League.” His smile tightens a bit and he glances down, awkward. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Alexander Hamilton.”

He sighs and withdraws from where Edward still has his hands on his upper arms, puts his bag on the table and glances once at Mister Stevens, watching them from the corner by the doorway to the hall. “ _Nothing_ , okay? The Ivy League thing isn’t a done deal, you know.”

Edward follows his glancing gaze; frowns, forces a cheery smile, and declares, “Well, _I_ have faith. And if not now, then after a year or two with me at UVI.” 

Which sounds great, and it sounds suffocating in ways he cannot explain even to himself. “You always know just what to say,” he says though. “Let me go put my stuff away, and then we can scheme some trouble while you’re home.”

 

x---x

 

They don’t manage to find any trouble that night. A quiet night in, just catching up, and then Edward goes out late for a quick drink with a high school friend who’s back in town as well. 

Alexander gets ready for bed, and then retreats to Edward’s room instead of his own; isn’t quite sure if he intends to sleep or just wait for him to get back, but he ends up dozing off anyway, closes his eyes and in what feels like seconds, becomes aware of fuzzy voices approaching the closed door.

“…said that she wanted to move back closer to home. I don’t know if they’ll -”

The door opens and the light flicks on almost simultaneously. Alexander doesn’t move, barely on the cusp of awake as he is, and hears a startled exclamation just before the lights switch off again almost as quickly. “Did Alex trade rooms and no one told me?”

And quieter, Mister Stevens: “No. Was probably just waiting on you and crashed.”

There’s a heavy pause, and then the door clicks softly shut again, and he can hear the departing voices. “What’s going on, dad? Alex isn’t himself.”

“I don’t know, Neddy.”

“Is it college stuff? Because…”

The rest is lost to the distance as they move back towards the living room. Alexander sighs and opens his eyes, rolls over onto his back and stares up at the dark ceiling. Doesn’t bother pretending when Edward returns ten minutes later, and he thinks the older boy will kick him out but he just slaps his hip and orders, “Scoot. You can have _your_ ass against the cold wall.” So he shifts, and appreciates that Edward doesn’t bother to maintain the façade that he’d slept through the intrusion a few minutes prior. “Am I imagining things, or are you and dad a little frosty?”

He shrugs. “We’ve had a spat or two. Nothing to write home about.”

“What’d you do?” he asks teasingly.

“Nothing any worse than the shit you pulled in high school,” he assures Edward. “Dumber, maybe,” he says, thinking about the _wine from strangers_ fight.

“I find that… hard to believe.” And he sighs, suddenly restless, doesn’t know what he expected, why he’s here at all, and regrets it altogether when Edward probes cautiously, “Dad said he yelled at you and… and grabbed you?... and freaked you out real bad.”

_Not fair_ , he wants to cry, even as the hot shame or embarrassment or _whatever_ surges in him. Not even sure _what’s_ not fair according to the helpless outrage in the back of his mind, exposing Alexander’s volatile moment outside the curtain behind which they’d shoved it and never spoke on it again, or more generally just dragging Edward into it.

Maybe just _not fair_ that Mister Stevens had paraphrased the encounter into such simple and simplistic self-incriminating terms.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he confesses in a choked whisper, and then buries his face in Edward’s chest and gasps down a sob.

“Talk to me.” He rubs his hand between Alexander’s shoulder blades and waits for his hiccups to subside. “C’mon. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not good enough.”

He pulls back. “Fuck off.”

“Okay,” Edward snorts softly. “Get out of _my_ bed, then.” So he does. Doesn’t bother being particularly careful with his elbows and knees and clambers overtop Edward, who he can practically _hear_ rolling his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alex.”

“I’m constantly keyed up to eleven, alright?” he hisses, not all too keen on letting this devolve into a shouting match that Mister Stevens can hear from his room or the living room or wherever. “It’s like being constantly sick to my stomach with nerves, with _nothing_ to be nervous about. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s happened. I just can’t _breathe_.”

Edward props himself on one elbow and watches as Alexander turns for the door. “And what insight does this doctor of yours in Frederiksted have to offer?” He pauses, tersely silent, with his hand on the doorknob and Edward laughs derisively. “You haven’t told her. Of course not. Why even go if you’re just wasting your time and hers?”

“Give her some credit,” he retorts, “she picks through my nonsense with uncanny ease.”

“Bullshit,” Edward fires right back. “You’ve always known _exactly_ what to say to people, how to _act_.” It hearkens back to Mister Stevens’s accusation – _You’ve been playing games since you came to live in this house_. “I’ve seen you do it; one face for us at home, another at school, like you can’t bear the thought of anyone seeing _you_ , what you’re _really_ thinking, what you _really_ feel, since your mother died, and I’ll bet that freakish ability to turn on a dime was how you managed to carry on an affair with a goddamn senator for weeks with _no one_ noticing.”

The resounding silence that follows is awful, and he can read Edward well enough by now to know that he wants to take the words back pretty much the moment they left his mouth.

Alexander doesn’t give him the chance to regret it. “Do the part next about how I sucked his dick so he’d give me a nice, prestigious internship down the line, that one’s my favorite.” He can hear Edward’s jaw click shut. “My second favorite was the _six hours with my senator_ hashtag, the internet had a lot of fun with that one during the hearings. _Ooh_ , and then the online campaign to rename it _Statutory Hall_.”

“Stop it, c’mon.”

“We only spent an hour of the six fucking, _maybe_ an hour and a half, just so you know. We weren’t that ambitious.”

“Goddammit, Alex, just get out of here.”

“There was actually equal opportunity dick-sucking, by the way. He didn’t -” He laughs hysterically, “He didn’t even want me to touch him, at first, like somehow it was okay if _he_ got _me_ off time and again and not actually, like, exponentially creepier that I wasn’t allowed to reciprocate. I had to get on my knees and _beg_ him, before he let me do more than lie there and let him, like -”

He trails off, hot and flushed and ashamed, glad for the darkened room so that he can’t see the expression on Edward’s face while he moves past the shock value and parses his words. “Like _what_?”

“I’m done.”

“Alex.”

He slips out the door, hears the rustling of blanket as Edward disentangles himself, and pointedly ignores the looming figure of Mister Stevens halfway down the hallway, perturbed and staring pensively down at the floor with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Go to bed, Alexander.”

“Already on it,” he mutters as he ducks past.

“I’m calling Doctor Kortright in the morning.”

“You do that.” 

He shuts and locks his door. Hears Edward’s door open, and Mister Stevens bark at him to go back to bed, too.

 

x---x

 

Alexander gives up on sleep when the clock strikes six. He silently begs that a restless night means the other two men in the house will sleep late, dons a hoodie, yanks a fleece blanket free from where it’s tangled and trapped between the mattress and the footboard, and pads quietly to the back door of the house. 

He wants coffee; doesn’t dare rattle around in the kitchen, and the smell would be sure to wake at least one of them up. So he settles for cocooning himself in the blanket on the top step of the back porch and alternating between fiddling with his phone and watching the shifting colors of the sky as the sun rises.

An hour passes before the sound of footsteps echoes out through the screen door. They pause, close and long enough that he can tell someone is peering out, checking that he’s out there, and then turn and retreat.

A few minutes later, he can smell coffee brewing; a few minutes after that, the screen door rattles as it’s shouldered open, and the heavy footsteps make their way slowly to his stoop. A coffee mug descends into view, and he chuckles despite himself and unwraps from his nest enough to take it.

And then Mister Stevens settles himself down beside him at the top of the steps and looks out over the yard, at the lingering hues in the morning light. “You get any sleep?”

“No.”

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

He bites back the instinctive prickliness and repeats, “No.” But then pauses and reiterates his whispered confession to Edward, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

To which Mister Stevens, ever-cautious Mister Stevens, responds levelly with a hint of challenge in his voice, “I think you do.” Alexander shoots him a look and then retracts his gaze just as quickly. “And I think you’re killing yourself inside trying to avoid admitting it. To me, to Doctor Kortright, to yourself.”

“And what,” he intones dully, “do you think you know?”

“You told Edward last night that you’re sick with nerves you can’t explain; that you feel like you can’t breathe.” He doesn’t bother denying it, unsure if Edward had relayed the conversation or if he’d said that bit loud enough to be overheard. “And what I _think_ , looking back, is that you’ve been here before, when you moved in. But I didn’t draw that connection, because it made you shut down at thirteen; now it’s making you lash out.”

He swallows heavily and doesn’t affirm or deny the postulation.

“What I _think_ is that it receded for a long time, if not disappeared altogether; and then that old anxiety started to ramp up probably while you were in D.C. Certainly when you came home. Shot way up when Edward left for school, and then went into orbit when Doctor Kortright started digging around in your head.”

Silence.

“But you only saw her a few times before the holidays. Edward came home, and John visited, and things were good. And then Edward went back to school and it’s been two long months with just me and you, and I think you can’t breathe because it terrifies you to be alone in the house with me.”

“It _doesn’t_ -” he chokes. “I’m not -”

“Anxiety doesn’t have to be rational,” Mister Stevens cuts off his frantic efforts. “You can know intellectually, as I hope you do, that I would _never_ hurt you in any way, and still be unable to separate the present reality from latent emotions caused by something that happened in the past. And something happened, didn’t it, Alexander?” He starts to open his mouth, and is cut off again. “And I’m not talking about Thomas Conway.”

Finding the strength to nod an affirmative to that might just be the hardest thing he’s done since a nervous phone call to James Madison ten months prior.

“One of the homes you were in before you came here was abusive. Physically, emotionally, sexu –”

“Emotionally, mostly,” he mumbles.

Mister Stevens looks at him carefully, but Alexander keeps his eyes determinedly fixed down at his socks. “Is there anything you’re willing to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to Doctor Kortright about it?”

“No.”

“Will you now?”

He sets down his quickly-cooling coffee and wipes at his eyes. “Yeah.”

“I’m still going to call her this morning.” He bites back a sigh. “And I’m going to tell her we had this conversation.”

“Fine.”

Mister Stevens studies his profile for a minute, and then lets out a sigh of his own. “Do you want to go inside for some breakfast?”

He starts to nod on automatic, and then shakes his head and instead edges closer to the man where they’re sitting with a good foot of space between them on the stoop. Mister Stevens moves his mug, and Alexander scooches closer again, and then leans stiffly into him until he shifts and wraps his arms around Alexander’s burrito-wrapped form and holds him close.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.

“I only want you to be _okay_ ,” Mister Stevens whispers into his hair. “I won’t lie, these past several weeks have been hard – but I’m not mad, Alexander. I’m not upset with you. I told you when you came home – I’m not going anywhere.”

He gets restless quickly, but lets himself stay relaxed in the hold, if more for Mister Stevens’s sake than his own.


	4. Part IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a last reminder to mind the tags before diving down the last part of this angsty rabbit hole.

Doctor Kortright pinches at the bridge of her nose as he finishes talking, and looks the most exasperated he thinks he’s ever seen her. _She knows_ , he can say with absolute certainty, but he just meets her gaze unapologetically and waits. 

He doesn’t wait long. “So.” She takes a sip of her tea and stares at him some more. “You had a panic attack when Mister Stevens followed you to your room to yell at you a couple weeks back. You lashed out at Edward when he tried to sort out the discontent between you and his father, and Mister Stevens finally connected enough dots in the nearly four years you’ve lived there to guess that you were in an abusive situation _before_ going to live there, by which you know damn well he meant a home you were placed in through Family Services.”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth now, was I?”

“And the _emotionally_ abusive part?” He shrugs dully. “He sounded… skeptical about that bit.”

“It’s less a lie than you’re thinking.”

“So why don’t you want him to know what really happened?”

He puts down his mug and shakes his head, incredulous. “ _Why_? Because it would kill him. I was smart, rational enough to know _that_ even at the time. It would absolutely _destroy_ Mister Stevens if he knew that three days after my mother died, he handed me over to a man who liked to climb into my bed and take my clothes off.” He looks away, up over her head and out the window. “It’s better this way. He’s dead, and it doesn’t matter.”

“Were you close with your cousin?”

“Incredibly,” he replies easily, bluntly. “I loved him. He was the only other family we had here, after his parents moved away. He babysat. Played with me like I was a little brother he never had. Talked to me when my father left. I loved him. I trusted him. And I loved him still, right up until the day he died, even if the trust had been brutally shattered three weeks after I moved into his house.”

He shakes his head and just… keeps talking. Is afraid to stop, now that he’s started, now that he’s admitting this for the first time after five long years of silence. “Obviously he couldn’t have known the custody agreement was going to amount to anything more than a formality, so it’s not like he was grooming me and just _waiting_ to have me there. He was terrified, you know? I could see that. Recognize that. I thought it scared him, effectively becoming a father overnight. _Now_ , looking back, looking at my childhood when he never once touched me, never gave me reason to be afraid – I’m not sure if he just had the self-control not to act on his inclinations, or knew I’d never hide it from my mother if he did. But I think he knew right away that he wouldn’t be able to cope anymore, in our changed circumstances. And I think he hated himself for it. And I think it killed him, in the end.”

“Do you feel guilty about that?”

“No.”

She cocks a brow. “You’re very sure.”

“I don’t,” he insists. “Took me a long time to feel anything besides numb. And then it just made me bitter.”

“Why?”

This part’s harder to explain. Raises the heat in his face, and he fights to meet her eyes. “Because I very consciously bargained with myself about staying; about staying quiet. Because I loved Peter and was afraid of more upheaval and the unknown, and so I told myself… _take the bad with the good, because the bad isn’t that bad._ He didn’t hurt me – in a very literal _,_ physical sense, he didn’t hurt me,” he cuts off the objection in her eyes. “I wasn’t assaulted. I don’t know if you could even call it… I don’t know, it’s not like I ever looked for a legal descriptor, but… he didn’t really touch me, except to undress me; didn’t expose himself to me, didn’t make me do anything. He just… wanted to look at me.”

“More emotional than sexual,” she connects his earlier assertion.

“I mean,” he smiles drily, “it was sexual for him, don’t get me wrong. But he had… rules, I guess. And he stuck to them. For my sake, or his own self-loathing, I can’t say. He didn’t like it when I cried, though, and eventually I stopped crying. Stopped _caring_ all that much, and some nights, he’d hold me after until I fell asleep, and I even let myself enjoy that, eventually. Enjoyed feeling like I had _someone_ still, and tried not to let myself worry… when does he want _more_? What happens when I get older, get bigger? Does he lose interest, or does he move the goalposts of what’s acceptable?” He sighs and looks away, pulls his feet up and wraps his arms around his knees. “Anyway. He killed himself and I was left wondering… what had been the point, then? I’d put up with it for nothing, in the end.”

“Did you worry about someone else taking advantage of you once you fell into the care of Family Services?”

He shakes his head, adamant. “No. I made that bargain once, I wasn’t going to do it again and certainly not at the hands of a stranger.” 

It registers a few seconds later what he’s just admitted; registers with Doctor Kortright too, by the sad smile on her face. “And when another man who you’d known for years – who loved you – offered you a home? A home with your best friend?” Tears prick behind his eyes for the first time since he sat down. “You started bargaining with yourself all over again, didn’t you? What you’d tolerate to stay.”

“Mister Stevens has _never_ touched me.”

“I know that. But your experience with Peter destroyed your trust that he _wouldn’t_ , didn’t it?”

“Which is another reason he doesn’t need to know the full truth. That would just be cruel at this point; to tell him that the shadow of his son’s best friend was quiet and shifty and withdrawn because I was always watching and waiting to see if that night, or the next, or the next, would be the one he turned up in my room.”

She watches him for a few minutes. Curious, sad, assessing. “Do you trust anyone, anymore?”

“I trust Edward,” he answers after a beat. “And John. On a basic _intellectual_ level, I trust Mister Stevens, but…”

“But,” she picks up, “you’ve been struggling through these questions of sex and consent, on the heels of another situation, with another man, where you were not only taken advantage of but then found yourself physically displaced as a result.”

And in the back of his mind, long before he’d admit it, long before the memories surfaced of long, scared, sleepless nights waiting to see if _this_ night, tonight, would find Peter at his bedroom door, that old anxiety had reared its ugly head.

“It felt different with Conway,” he says down to his lap, “except in all the ways it felt the same. It was… he fought it, you know? He knew it was wrong, and kept… _reminding me_ that it was wrong. We both acknowledged it upfront, and that made it… okay.” Shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense, I realize.”

“No,” she frowns thoughtfully. “It does, in its way. You felt… complicit in the decision and therefore in control of the situation.”

“I told Washington that I didn’t feel _tricked_ , like somehow that was the only line that mattered. Like professional ethics and consent laws meant nothing since _I_ , Alexander Hamilton, was fully aware of the stupidity of the actions I was taking.” 

“And what did Washington say?”

It’s occurred, since Saturday morning’s confessions, that this moment here might have _actually_ been what set off his current struggles, and not Edward leaving or starting his appointments with Doctor Kortright.

He clears his throat and says softly, “He more or less wanted to know why I’d spoken up at all, then. He asked if it was the suspicion that there had been others in my place, or the realization that people were… were standing silently by and doing nothing about it.” She just watches him, questioning. “Bit of both,” he murmurs. “Mostly the latter.”

“Even if only subconsciously, the experiences clearly became linked in your mind. And after withstanding such a trauma in your childhood, scared and alone, to find yourself in a situation where someone _could_ have stepped in, _could_ have done the right…” She registers his glassy stare, his trembling hands lowering his cup to the floor. “Alexander?”

He buries his head in his arms and shakes it back and forth. “But I wasn’t – I’m sorry,” he gasps, muffled, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” 

Because this. _This_ is the great secret shame of his childhood.

That when all was said and all was done, it was not Peter, twisted and sick and broken as he was, who emerged the greatest villain in his story. 

“Okay, whoa. Breathe.” But he’s trembling and can’t draw enough breath and lets out a panicked sob, which just robs him of air all the faster and accelerates the panic.

No one had understood. _This isn’t about Conway_ , he’d told James Madison. _Not entirely, anyway_. 

No one had _wanted_ to understand; except, maybe, Washington: _Was it the thought that there had been others, or the thought that someone would stand silently by and let it happen…?_

But Washington had never had enough pieces to put that puzzle together.

No one did. He’d made sure of it.

_…that freakish ability to turn on a dime…_

Except.

He’s vaguely cognizant that she’s still talking while he cries; great heaving sobs, pain and anger, betrayal and grief he shoved deep down and locked away when he was twelve, wrenching emotions that have threatened to surface time and again since the prior spring, fighting their way through any crack they could find behind the wall he’d erected to protect himself five years ago.

_…just say it. Finish the thought and he’ll end this now…_

That wall’s already crumbled to dust, and only now is the dust settling enough to give him a clear glimpse of what lay inside.

“…eight, nine, ten, deep breath.” Pause. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”

He counts. In his head at first, and then mumbled alongside her. Counts and breathes, and then does it in French because it makes him think of his mother.

“Hey.” He blinks blearily over at where she’s moved to sit beside him, close but not touching, a box of tissues and a water bottle sitting on the floor by his feet. “You with me?”

Alexander wipes at his face with one hand and grabs a tissue with the other. Blows his nose and sniffles, and admits, “I’m really bad at this.”

“You can’t be bad at therapy, Alexander.”

“I don’t tell you things; I know what things matter, and then I just…”

She shrugs, leans down to try to catch his eye and offers a gentle smile. “I don’t like to consider it avoidance so much as… taking a more _wandering_ path to the truth.”

“Can I see the intake paperwork Mister Stevens did for me back in December?”

A strange request, to be sure, but she hesitates only a moment and then tells him she’ll be right back. Must go out to the receptionist’s office, comes back a few minutes later with a thin folder and a packet of stapled pages, which she hands over.

It doesn’t take him long to find the discrepancy, and he laughs, the sound verging on hysterical, but he knew this was missing all along and never bothered to correct the assumption, went out of his way to talk _around_ it, just like he never bothered to explain his detour to Peter’s house on his way to Family Services until it came up more explicitly in conversation. “Can I have a pen?”

She hands it over in silence, watching him intently as he sticks the cap in his mouth and starts scribbling on the top page.

There’s a space at the top, under new patient information, for parent/legal guardian: _Thomas Stevens_. 

A section for biographical information, including parents: _Rachel Faucette (deceased) & James Hamilton (?)._

A section for occupants of the household and their ages: _Alexander Hamilton (16) & Thomas Stevens (45) & Edward Stevens (18)._

So he draws a box underneath the one for his parents and writes at the top of it _Siblings_ and sketches in: _James Hamilton, Jr (22)._

And he passes the form back. Doctor Kortright stares at it, brow furrowing. “You have an older brother.” And he can see the moment when she does the math and the realization hits her. “An older brother who was still seventeen when your mother passed.” He stares, brows raised, expectant, a reversal of their usual roles. “He was seventeen, and so Peter had custody of him as well.”

“And he stood silently by,” Alexander murmurs, staring blankly at the wall, “and did nothing about it. He did nothing. Told me Peter would surely stop, once he’d caught him at it, and then spent the next five months doing everything in his power to avoid seeing or hearing anything that would belie the fantasy he’d crafted in his head.” He closes his eyes. “He did nothing.”

 

x---x

 

He skips school the next day. Sleeps in and then wanders down to the beach mid-morning with Edward, too early for the onslaught of spring breaking college kids. He sits, and then sprawls out in the sand while Edward walks along the edge of the surf, pausing here and there to pick up rocks and shells to study.

Eventually he comes back, armed with a tiny plastic shovel, and starts piling sand onto Alexander’s stomach, one scoop at a time. “Oh my God. Stop.” He’s cheerily ignored. “Where did you even get that?” 

“One girl’s lost pink shovel is another man’s treasure.” Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. “Think Plato said that.” 

“I’m shaking out my clothes overtop your sheets when we get back.”

 

They leave when it starts to get crowded. Stop by their old favorite food window and eat curry rice while they walk the rest of the way back to the house, where the day’s mail is sitting on the kitchen table. 

He spots the Columbia logo before his own name, and tucks the envelope into his back pocket without opening it. Neither Edward nor Mister Stevens comment on it for the rest of the day.

 

x---x

 

Close to a minute passes while he hovers in the doorway fidgeting, watching Mister Pendleton grading papers at his desk. It’s a big stack and he looks busy, and Alexander’s just starting to talk himself out of this altogether when the man finally glances up and smiles brightly to see him standing there. “Alexander! Come in, come in.”

“You look busy.”

“I am; here, come help me grade.” He blinks, but his teacher looks dead serious while he sorts out a group of papers and slaps them down on the other side of the desk. “Grab a pen, pull up a chair.” There’s a mug of assorted color pens and pencils next to the computer. He grabs a hot pink one and quirks a brow. “Edgy.” So he pulls a chair around and looks down at the sophomore class tests – American civics – and bites back a smile. “Don’t touch the essays, mind, you’re a far harsher critic than I.”

It’s mindless; it’s relaxing; it’s frustrating, how many times he has to correct the responses about overriding a presidential veto, and they chit-chat while they work. Mister Pendleton doesn’t ask about D.C., doesn’t ask what brought him to his door. Just talks about an interesting journal he read recently, asks if Edward’s on spring break. They bicker light-heartedly about the reading material for the next unit in Alexander’s class, and when he’s gone through about half of his stack of tests maybe twenty minutes later, he pauses in between pages and asks in total non sequitur, “You had my brother as a senior, didn’t you? James.”

“Sure,” his teacher answers after a beat. “Class of ’14?” Alexander nods. “That was my first year teaching here.”

“That’s the year our mom died,” he says, still marking away and not looking up.

“I remember.”

It’s quiet; he finishes the page, and then lays down his pen and rubs at his eyes. “This is going to sound weird, but… what was he like?”

Mister Pendleton searches his eyes carefully before he answers, and his words are slow, a bit cautious. “He was… smart, but uninterested. It was hard to spark his imagination.” And then he adds: “He wasn’t like you.” Alexander feels himself go a bit pink. “He pretty well checked out after your mother passed. Missed school a lot. Some periodic trouble with the administration, if I recall right.”

“I’m sure you do.” He sighs and averts his gaze sideways, out the windows overlooking the lunch courtyard. “Sounds right, anyway.”

“Is everything okay?” Alexander blinks at him, eyes hot, and fights to hold the tears at bay. “Are _you_ okay? We missed you yesterday.”

_Did you ever ask James that?_ he wonders morbidly at the back of his mind. _Ever pull him aside with an earnestly concerned ‘Is everything okay at home?’ once he checked out and lashed out in his own way because he couldn’t face what had become of the tatters of his life?_

Either way, the answer would devastate him. He doesn’t ask.

And instead, he responds quietly, sincerely, “Mental health day.”

“We all need one of those, from time to time.”

_If only you knew_.

“We never talked about D.C.”

The pivot makes sense in his head. Mister Pendleton pauses again, perhaps has the beginnings of the inkling that they’re having two entirely different conversations with one another. “I got the sense you weren’t keen to discuss it.”

“I don’t like the thought of having disappointed you,” he admits, barely above a whisper, twirling the pen around on the desktop just for something to do with his fidgety fingers.

“Did I give you the impression you had?”

“…no.” He sighs and looks around the room and remembers – afternoons like this one during his sophomore year, usually downstairs in the library, poring over application materials, researching the senators accepting applications, trying to figure out the one who would be intrigued by the audacity and determination of applying from the territories. “But you put a lot of time into getting me there, and I threw away my shot.”

His teacher catches his eye, smiles sympathetically. “Columbia not going to work out?”

“It -” he chokes, opens his mouth and closes it again.

“An Ivy League education isn’t the end-all-be-all of future achievement,” Mister Pendleton tells him while he leans down to slide the somewhat rumpled envelope from the front pocket of his backpack sitting at his feet. “You’re ambitious and resourceful, and probably the most brilliant student I’ll ever have the privilege to teach.”

He quietly slides the envelope over and, after a questioning glance, Mister Pendleton withdraws the letter and reads.

And starts.

And laughs incredulously. “Alexander…”

“I can’t accept it.”

“…What? They – they’re offering you _everything_.”

“And I can’t accept it,” he repeats. “It’s… a lie.”

“ _Alexander_ ,” he leans forward, eyes pleading. “This is what you’ve wanted, what you’ve worked for. For _years_.”

He swallows. “I didn’t earn it.”

“Alexander.” He forces his eyes up. “You can’t let a single dumb, hotheaded mistake dictate your future. If the admissions folks don’t care about that, then -”

“They _don’t_ care about that,” he interrupts harshly. “They don’t care that I got expelled; that I had to make up a quarter’s worth of credit over the summer with all the kids who failed English 9. They probably don’t care all that much about my grades, and they probably never gave _your_ recommendation letter a second thought after they read the one George Washington wrote with Thomas Jefferson, the one I submitted in a moment of panicked weakness.” The man’s brows fly up, surprised, impressed, still a bit confused. “How many kids apply to college with the backing of the president?” he asks bitterly.

“None, I expect,” Mister Pendleton says wryly. “Which makes it impressive and not something to be ashamed of, that he would advocate for you even after you slipped up.”

He chuckles low, mirthless. “ _Slipped up_. Good a euphemism as any, I suppose.” His teacher frowns at him. “He wrote it out of guilt; I barely knew the man. Think we spoke three times before he marched me into his office and kicked me out.”

“Then why -?”

“Because if he’d rescinded the expulsion, like he really wanted, he’d have had to tell too many people _why_.” He barrels on ahead, doesn’t let his teacher get in the logical follow-up question. “And _this_ way, I get to tell people I got kicked out because I punched an intern, and it’s entirely a coincidence that a few hours after I boarded a plane back home, Thomas Conway resigned in disgrace.”

He wipes at the single tear that’s finally escaped the corner of his eye. “I got a full ride to Columbia because I let a senator, a man more than twice my age, take me home and fuck me. How do I accept that scholarship? How do I let _that_ be my legacy?”

The ensuing silence doesn’t last as long as it could; the initial shock wears off fast enough that he supposes the possibility had crossed Mister Pendleton’s mind during those early weeks of quiet avoidance.

“You don’t,” he answers softly. “You take the chance that’s been offered – a _second_ chance, if that’s how you see it – and start crafting a _new_ legacy.” Alexander claps a hand over his mouth to muffle a gasping sob. “This does not define you, Alexander.”

“It defines him.”

“Yes,” Mister Pendleton replies, blunt. “It does. And it should. There are some lines, for someone in a position such as his, that _cannot be crossed_.”

He stares down at his shoes and wipes at his eyes with his sleeves.

“Does Tom know?” He forces a strangled laugh and nods, but Mister Pendleton elaborates, “About the scholarship, I mean.”

Sniffle. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I don’t go, he’ll think it’s a waste and be disappointed; and if I do, I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, and he’ll be sad.”

“Will _you_ be sad?” He shrugs, but that feels too harsh, so he forces a stilted nod. “He’s been good to you, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yes. Better than I deserve sometimes, it feels like.”

Mister Pendleton smiles. “That’s family, Alexander.” He squeezes his eyes shut against the _new_ onslaught of tears. “Physical distance doesn’t break one apart any more than the happenstance of shared genetics necessarily creates one in the first place. And it may grow and shrink over the years, and you may find more in unexpected places along the way. My advice?” He nods. “Let yourself.”

Part of him wishes he’d drummed up the courage for this conversation months ago; most of him realizes he wouldn’t have been ready for it.

“Come on,” Mister Pendleton claps his hands down on the desk and stands. “I’ll take you home.”

And during the drive, he finally tells him about D.C.

Getting wrong-footed on day one, shuffled from Washington’s office to Jefferson’s; Jefferson’s eccentric Capitol tour with his coffee spots and library nooks and cafeterias ranked by meal quality and rush hour crowds; six a.m. classes and late nights sneaking down to the computer lab because he’s always done his best work when the world is quiet around him.

Philadelphia. Yorktown. His three-way translation debacle with Friedrich von Steuben, and John’s hilarious over-investment into the love life of a nearby café owner and Washington’s campaign chief.

Leaving without saying goodbye, and being forgiven without hesitation or reservation.

A car ride through many of these same winding roads ten long months ago and his insistence – _I’m okay_.

_No, you’re not_. And a promise – _I’m not going anywhere_.

With no idea as to the substance, the complexity of the difficulties ahead, Mister Stevens had still known Alexander better in that moment that he knew himself. Or maybe just better than he’d _admit_ to himself.

His narrative long abandoned, he stares pensively out the window as they approach the limits of the town. And he realizes – accepts, finally – that there’s really only one option left to him.

When they pull up in front of the house, the quiet between them turns heavy. There should be a familiarity to this moment – Alexander pulling his bag out of the car after him and calling a fast _thanks for the ride_ before the door’s fully closed, as he’d done on a handful occasions as a sophomore when they’d stayed after to research the Page Program and go over his application materials.

There _is_ familiarity to it, but his overwrought psyche picks out the wrong details. Hands gripping the steering wheel just a bit too hard, and he’s twelve again and in the car with Peter who is rigidly tense – not, as Alexander thought in the moment, about all that had recently happened but, as he’d later realize, about what he’d already known was inevitably to come.

A quiet breath, almost a sigh, of a man who’s not quite sure what to say, and he’s back in a closing garage under Thomas Conway’s townhome, realizing that they’ve broken an unspoken rule in moving this illicit thing out of the shadows of the Capitol basement; a looming sort of nervous dread to which he could put no words.

Doctor Kortright’s voice echoes in the back of his head – _Do you trust anyone, anymore?_ – and he closes his eyes and takes a calming breath and says, “Thank you. And sorry, I wasn’t planning on… I really did just come to ask you about my brother.”

Which feels retrospectively like a neon sign declaring the bizarre way his brain has linked Thomas Conway and James Hamilton – two people who have never met, will never meet and, in all likelihood, neither of whom Alexander will ever see again. A troubled look flits across Mister Pendleton’s face, there and gone again quick as blinking, and Alexander can’t tell if he’s gleaned anything from it or not.

“Please remember what I said, Alexander,” he says, eventually, in reply. “You’ve had… _Christ_ , the last five years have given you enough heartache and grief to fill a lifetime. Don’t lose your faith in yourself; and try not to lose faith in _people_ , if you’ve got any left.”

At some point in the couple minutes the car’s been idling at the curb, Edward came outside to hover on the porch, and he descends down the walkway as Alexander finally extracts himself with the obligatory, “Thanks for the ride,” and catches the car door before it can close and leans in, grinning.

“Hey, Mister P!”

They’re already chatting about UVI and Saint Thomas by the time Alexander gets to the porch. Their voices fade away as the screen door clangs shut behind him, and he deposits his backpack on the kitchen table and withdraws the financial aid letter from Columbia, just a bit more rumpled for its latest trip in and out of the bag.

And, clutching it tightly in his hands, as if a sudden and inexplicable gust of wind will whip it out of his grasp, he sets off to find Mister Stevens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wellllp. 
> 
> Uh. Happy New Year?
> 
> That's all that's lined up in this series for now. Busy couple Real Life months ahead but, as ever, we'll see how it goes. 
> 
> Many thanks to all of you who joined me along for this absurd ride. It's been a crazy year, and this universe has been my favorite escape. 
> 
> Cheers, and feel free to [Tumbl Me](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/faceofpoe)


End file.
